[seattle_spring]

> You can bypass the whole charade by knowing 2-3 people within Google that can provide "assurance" you are good enough.

This is not a thing. Everyone goes through the same level-adjusted loop.

> Another way is to be a significant contributor to some popular open source project.

LOL no. Google is literally famous for rejecting major open source contributors for not knowing how to reverse a binary tree.

[tropo]

Is there something special about reversing a binary tree?

AFAIK, you could swap the child pointers and do that recursively for the child nodes. You could also do things O(1) by just changing the comparison function, perhaps by wrapping it to negate the comparison.

[shaftway]

This is a specific, well-known case. Max Howell (the author of Brew) was rejected by Google. One of his interviewers asked him to invert a binary tree.

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

[bitL]

If they really want you, they do all they can to get you on board even if you are failing/aren't motivated to do their entrance interviews and what I mentioned are two such criteria they use to bypass their process for very senior hires. They would literally give you $3M signing bonus in extreme cases or acquihire your team/company if you still didn't want to move.

They probably didn't want Brew author that much; we don't know the details.